🌿 Journey to Kiangardarup 🌿
Zielinski’s career bridges craft, composition, and sound. Not only a world class traditional Irish fiddler but also a composer, a master violin maker, and a sonic innovator whose work blurs the lines between folk tradition, orchestral compositions, and avant-garde field recording. But above all, he is a listener. His philosophy embodied in Kiangardarup is that the world is already singing, and the artist’s role is to attune themselves to its frequencies.
At the southern tip of Western Australia, where the continent leans out into the Southern Ocean, the coastline fractures into inlets and headlands. Torbay Inlet is one of these: a tidal pool ringed by tea-tree scrub and nearby towards West Cape Howe are ancient karri forests whose trunks rise like cathedral columns. The air is saturated with salt, eucalyptus oil, and the perpetual drip of water. On certain mornings, mist drapes across the inlet like muslin gauze. This is a place Rob Zielinski can hear melodies. When I joined him there with my camera, he explained how the inlet’s still water reflects sounds back to him which he weaves into his music.
It isn't musical notation or hums into a dictaphone. For Rob it is phrases rising from the water itself, carried on the breeze or traced in the Eucalyptus canopy. Zielinski calls it “deep listening”, a way of tuning himself to the voice of the landscape. While we there by the water's edge of the Torbay Inlet Rob recollected, 'I was fishing just over there and it was a soft milky day and a bird landed on the water in front of me and it just when it landed I heard those first four notes of the suite.'
Rob says he did not set out to create an album. But as he stood by the inlet phrases surfaced and gathered, aligning themselves into a cycle: the passage of a day from dawn to dusk, and of a night from dusk to dawn. Over time, he realised what he had been given - a suite, a continuous story in music. He called it Kiangardarup, the Noongar name for Torbay Inlet.
Zielinski first attempted to record Kiangardarup in a concert hall in Perth, the sound was grand but alienating. “Too aloof,” he recalls. What he wanted was intimacy: the feeling that the listener was inside the music, playing it themselves. This could not be achieved in a hall.
He took his microphones and his handmade violin to the inlet and the forests. For eighteen months he became a field recordist, sometimes in the pitch black of the early morning, waiting for low wind, for the lull between squalls, or perhaps ready to catch the playful chorus of frogs, maybe a white bird on the wing. He would set his gear—a MixPre-6 recorder, an AKG C414 condenser mic, sometimes a 1950s ribbon microphone—and wait.
The environment became his studio. He discovered that the inlet’s surface reflected sound back to him, giving the fiddle a “glassy, gritty” tone. In the karri forest, he moved among the trunks until he found what he called a “sweet spot,” where resonance gathered like light in a clearing. The trees themselves sang back, amplifying certain frequencies. Moisture in the air made the violin sweeter; the forest’s dampness became a filter.
These experiments became a practice. Rather than background noise to be eliminated or minimised, the environment became Rob's collaborator. The rain, the crows, the frogs—noises a studio engineer would normally strip away—were integrated into the mix. They also became storytellers of Kiangardarup.
As the melodies accumulated, Zielinski began to perceive a layered ecology. The fiddle became the storyteller, his own voice. The wooden flute, played by Manuela Centanni, became the answering call of the bush and the sky. The bouzouki, played by Jim Green, was the surface of the water, bright and shifting. The cello, played by Melinda Forsythe, anchored the whole as the earth beneath our feet.
Each instrument occupies an ecological niche, and together they enact the cycle of the inlet’s day and night. The suite is not only music but place.
Initially when Rob took his raw recordings for further production he was told by sound engineers that this wasn't how you make an album and how could he expect anything usable to come of music recorded in the middle of the Australian bush. Zielinski undeterred took his raw recordings to Lee Buddle of Crank Recording studio in Perth. He listened and understood Rob's quest. Lee became a powerful creative ally. Forsythe, Centanni, and Green laid their parts over the raw bush takes. Later, a Noongar musician, Ken Hayward, added didgeridoo to a track, extending the dialogue with place.
The final stage was London, where senior mastering engineer Andrew Walter of Abbey Road oversaw the album’s completion. Zielinski traveled there to ensure the rawness remained intact. The goal was not polish but authenticity: to keep the drops of rain, the breathing forest, the sense of natural space.
When Kiangardarup premiered at the Perth Concert Hall, the ovation was immediate. Critics called it a masterpiece, and the Global Music Awards honored it with three silver medals for World Music, Instrumentalist, and Sound Editing/Mixing. Stevie Connor of The Sound Café wrote that Zielinski had created “a tribute as much to his West Australian home as to the enduring spirit of Irish traditional music.”
For Zielinski, the achievement is less about accolades and more about whether he had he done justice to the place? Had he listened deeply enough?
To understand how such a project could come into being—why a musician would choose to record not in the clean resonance of a hall or a recording studio but in a forest alive with frogs and rain—you have to go back to Zielinski’s beginnings.
Born in Perth, Western Australia, he was seven when he first heard the fiddle. His Polish grandfather, recognising something in the boy, handed him a small violin. Lessons began in the Perth Hills, where his neighbors Eddie Lowe and Sean Doherty (a fiddler from County Mayo) schooled him in the Irish tradition. This was not the regimented pedagogy of scales and sight-reading. It was oral, relational, embodied. Tunes were learned by ear, phrase by phrase, until they lived inside the player.
The most formative influence of those years, though, was his twenty-five-year friendship with Mick Doherty, a Co. Donegal fiddler from an itinerant family of musicians. Doherty carried with him a treasury of rare tunes, and together they preserved them in Out West, an album recorded with the National Library of Australia. Zielinski describes this apprenticeship not in terms of lessons but of immersion, of being “inside a world of music.”
At seventeen he left for Ireland, effectively transplanting himself into the soil of the tradition. He settled first in Feakle, East Clare, where fiddlers like PJ Hayes and Paddy Canny welcomed him. Hayes’s rhythmic, driving bowing made an indelible mark. Tin-whistle player Joe Bane, whose phrasing was said to make men stop mid-step in a pub, impressed on him the idea that melody alone could hold an audience spellbound. Later, in Sligo, he studied under Andrew Davey and eventually taught for three years at the Galway School of Traditional Irish Music. In 2000, he was awarded the Michael Coleman Fiddle Player of the Year, cementing his reputation as a master of the idiom.
This immersion left him with a musical philosophy: the melody is everything. Unlike classical composition, which layers melody over harmonic scaffolding, the Irish oral tradition privileges the line itself—its contour, ornamentation, the way it moves people to dance. Rhythm and harmony emerge organically, secondary to the integrity of the tune. It is this “melody-first” sensibility that allowed Zielinski to recognize the phrases arriving at Torbay as a story, already formed.
In his early thirties, an injury forced him to lay down the bow for a time. He returned from Ireland to Western Australia, reconnected with Mick Doherty, and eventually took up violin making. The craft required the same patience and precision he had honed in music: planing Italian spruce, carving Bosnian maple, coaxing resonance from wood.
When he completed his first violin—sixty year old spruce and eighty year old maple —something uncanny happened. He would describe it as though the instrument itself were an antenna, tuned to the frequencies of the landscape.
Rob walking among the Karri forest pausing to test resonance with his fiddle is to see this principle in action. It is not merely that music can be made outdoors, or that natural acoustics can enrich sound but that that creativity itself may lie in surrender: not imposing structure, but receiving it. Not writing, but listening.
I was there to document Rob’s creative process — to retrace his steps through places such the Torbay Inlet, West Cape Howe, Martup Pool, the Wandoo & Porongurup National Parks where much of the music was born — and to give a visual form to these environments. As I filmed him under the karri canopy, the hush of dusk settling in, it struck me that what Zielinski had done with Kiangardarup was not to capture a landscape but to reveal it, to let us hear what had been there all along. Misty dawns, the hush beneath the canopy, the glow of firelight under stars: these were not just backdrops, but images chosen to echo the suite’s journey from first light to campfire embers, so that viewers could experience how the landscape itself shaped the music.
DP Reel from Journey to Kiangardarup
Selections from Journey to Kiangardarup shoot. Music: Track 3 - Great Southern Raining from the album Journey to Kiangardarup by Rob Zielinski
I'm grateful to have contributed to Rob's story along with the many generous supporters who helped push the project beyond its funding goals — ensuring we can tell not just the music, but the story of the place it comes from.
More about the project:
Australian Cultural Fund
Robert Zielinski - Doco
Robert Zielinksi - Recordings
